


The Needs of the One

by Eireann



Category: Star Trek: Enterprise
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-22
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:06:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27100099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eireann/pseuds/Eireann
Summary: Coda to 'The Needs of the Two'.  After being held in prison for months awaiting trial on false charges, Malcolm has the inevitable reaction.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 10
Collections: Reed's Armory Collection





	1. Langford

**Author's Note:**

  * For [delighted](https://archiveofourown.org/users/delighted/gifts).



> Star Trek and all its intellectual property is owned by Paramount/CBS. No infringement intended, no money made.
> 
> Author's Note 1: This won't make much sense if you haven't read its predecessor.  
> Author's Note 2: I honestly don't believe I've written a story that would deserve that second tag. I must be going soft in my old age...

* * *

“Now, we’re home! There you go!” Holly opened the cat carrier, and Dickon shot out of it and fled behind the armchair. “Now, don’t you even try to pretend you weren’t spoiled back there! Why, you were absolutely _purring_ at Mrs Metcalfe just now, so don’t think I didn’t hear you!

“Malcolm, _you_ heard him, didn’t you?”

There was no reply.

“Malcolm?” She turned and pushed the front door wider.

His Starfleet bag lay on the step beside her own; but Malcolm was gone.

=/\=

Heavy-hearted, but not wholly surprised, she showered, dried herself and changed into a shabby Arran knitted jumper and a pair of tatty old denim jeans, throwing every item of clothing from their luggage into the washing machine – an act she recognised in herself as being as much psychological as practical. After what had happened, she wanted and needed to draw a line in the sand, to dissociate herself from something that was now firmly and thankfully in the past.

The months she’d spent in America had wreaked the expected havoc on her usually neat garden. It was now early November, and though it seemed it had been a relatively quiet autumn so far – there were still a fair number of trees with their leaves still attached – it had been a wet one. The paving stones on the patio were still soaked from the overnight rain, and every bush in the garden was spangled. Her herb garden, untended, had run wild; it would take a deal of work to tidy everything up ready for the coming winter. But she had time, and at least making a start on it would give her something to do rather than just sit there waiting and worrying.

Still, it took some effort to make just one cup of coffee and sit down with it. This wasn’t how she’d envisaged their homecoming at all, but perhaps she should have done. On the Transatlantic flight Malcolm had sat beside her as rigid as a statue, and she’d had to fasten his seatbelt for him; his hands had been shaking too badly for him to do it himself, though when the time came to undo it he managed that and flung the two halves of the clasp away as though they burned him. Aware that delayed reactions to emotional trauma were natural and, indeed, often inevitable, she’d concentrated on talking to him gently to take his mind off the sensation of being trapped again. Rather than traumatise him any further by taking the internal flight to Newcastle she’d booked seats on the next available train to Darlington, recklessly pressing the Starfleet credit card into service to travel first class; she thought both of them deserved it after what they’d been through. From Darlington they’d taken a taxi home – detouring to pick up Dickon from the cattery – and arrived, completely spent, in middle of a windy grey morning that could hardly be more of a contrast to San Francisco.

Eventually the cat deigned to emerge from the back of the chair, sniffed suspiciously around to make sure the luggage had disappeared, and jumped up on to her lap. After staring at her accusingly for a couple of moments he settled down there. She started to stroke him, and a few seconds later he started to purr and butt against her hand; she was evidently forgiven.

“He’ll be okay, won’t he, sweetie?” she said, finding a lump in her throat. “He hasn’t ... he wouldn’t have...”

Dickon pushed up against her chin and started to rub consolingly against her jaw, and she took a deep breath and told herself not to be so damned melodramatic. If Malcolm had survived everything he’d had thrown at him so far, he bloody well wouldn’t go and throw it all away just when he’d finally won clear. Tiredness made you think stupid things, that was all; and if her experience with her more specialised patients had taught her anything, it was that they almost always threw some kind of spanner in the works, precisely when you thought you had everything sorted.

=/\=

Nightfall – early, at this time of year – found her still alone. 

The clouds had cleared. For November, it was relatively mild, and the benignly smiling moon showed no frosty halo.

All evening she waited for the step in the hallway that didn’t come. She ate her dinner alone and in silence, apart from the soft, compelling music of Einaudi’s _I Giorni,_ playing on the music player in the kitchen. One window had been left open and sound carries a long way at night; and so often she’d watched Malcolm’s long, dexterous fingers following the piano line on his thighs or on any convenient flat surface until his brain registered he’d played a duff note and he gave up – usually with a grunt or an exasperated huff.

Resolutely shutting out the possibility that he’d never intended to come back at all, she hoped he was somewhere close enough to hear it.

By eleven, she was at the end of her tether. For all her anxiety, her brain was simply shutting down.

She went into the kitchen, switched off the music player, closed the window and warmed up a cup of her homemade spiced wine. There were two mugs set out but she only filled one, though she left the bottle out, just in case.

As she passed the patio door she looked out through the glass. The lawn was a sea of silver, but the flowerbeds around it had been struck by the first frosts and were sad ghosts of their summer splendour; beyond the wall the woods looked dark and cold. High overhead in the black winter sky, Orion burned.

On an impulse she set down the mug on the dresser. Taking the key from its hiding place, she unlocked the patio door and stepped outside, shivering in the sudden comparative chill even though the open window had lowered the kitchen’s temperature somewhat.

To one side sat the patio set where on summer afternoons she’d enjoyed lunch and a glass of wine, with an antique embroidered tablecloth lending the rather shabby old table an air of glamour. She had a tall slender vase she kept for a centrepiece, just big enough to hold a couple of stems of lavender or one or two twigs from the fuchsia by the back door, dripping blossoms. Chaffinches and robins would whirr down and beg for crumbs of whatever bread or cake she was eating, which she always gave them; one of the first things she’d done after returning home had been to load up the bird-table, which now stood empty beside the sprawling wreckage of the Viburnum bush, though earlier the hanging feeders had been busy with blue-tits, bullfinches and chaffinches.

She hadn’t even seen the change. Normally she loved the autumn, even though it was one of her busiest times in the garden; there was so much to harvest and preserve. This year, however, she’d been elsewhere, and there probably wouldn’t be much she’d be able to salvage – not that she grudged that, not for a moment, but the change when you hadn’t been here to experience it day by day was wrenchingly sudden. She’d left it at the very moment when it was about to yield up the summer’s bounty and now it seemed as though some mighty, malignant wizard had waved his wand and suddenly her beautiful garden was dying.

Well. OK. But sometimes you just have to go with an idea...

She walked to where the couple of old steps led down between the low stone wall to the lawn. There she hesitated, and then put her head back. “Ow-ooo-ooooo...”

Only the querulous note of an owl answered. The dale was silent under the moon.

She waited for perhaps five minutes, rubbing her arms in the effort to warm them up; even with the jumper on, the cold night air was penetrating. Then, with a sigh, she turned to go back inside.

There was a beech hangar further down the dale, towards Nappa. Apart from the patch of woodland behind her house, it was the only significantly forested area for several miles.

Distantly, from that direction, she caught a long-drawn-out, faint sound: _“Ow-ooo-oooooooo...”  
_


	2. Reed

Dawn was breaking redly in the east as he pushed open the front gate.

He was cold, tired, sore and stiff. Also extremely hungry. His survival skills hadn’t failed him – a rabbit and a wood-pigeon could have testified to that – but the weeks of violent exercise in the gaol at Richmond had bulked up muscles which needed more calories than his leaner physique would have ordinarily required. As a result, he now had a voracious appetite. He’d found some apples on a tree leaning over a farmyard wall, eaten the fungi known as Wood Ears and Honey Fungus which he’d found growing on a fallen log in the beech hangar (the log that had afforded him overnight shelter, though Trip wouldn’t have approved of its other residents) and even risked exasperating his often rather temperamental stomach by eating several handfuls of late blackberries from the brambles around it. They contained vitamins, minerals and antioxidants, and he felt the benefits outweighed the risks.

But he’d needed the two nights alone and – above all – _free_. God, how badly he’d needed them. Badly enough to flee without a word and leave Holly to worry – as he knew she would; even as he’d vaulted over the cottage’s front wall a part of him had castigated himself for his selfishness. But quite simply it hadn’t felt as if he had an option. Even the simple act of telling her what he planned felt like being _answerable_ , and his entire being had rebelled, rising up in a frenzied bid for freedom.

Well, he’d had it. It hadn’t been much fun, not in early November, but he hadn’t done it for ‘fun’. For the first twenty-four hours, in hindsight, he hadn’t been quite sane. After what he’d endured there was always going to be a reaction, and now it had started.

He hoped – he believed – that Holly would have had enough trust in him to refrain from reporting him missing. Now he’d regained enough of himself to feel proper remorse for what he’d done to her, he was conscious of a twinge of anxiety as to what reception he’d get. She’d be entirely justified in hitting him round the head with a plank after putting her through so much unnecessary anxiety.

He hadn’t taken a house key but he knew where one was hidden. It was the work of moments to retrieve it, startling a fox that had been crossing the herb garden and which vanished in a red streak over the wall.

Heaving a long sigh that had more than one source, he quietly slid the key into the lock. But almost as he did so he heard a series of thudding noises from inside and an unmistakable ‘Bollocks!’

Startled, he jerked the door open, only to behold Holly lying in a tangle of arms and legs almost on the bottom step of the stairs opposite the door. “What the _hell-?”_

“I heard the gate!” she gasped between laughter and crying. “And I was running down and missed a step!”

“You daft bloody haddock, I can’t leave you alone for ten minutes!” He darted forward, his hesitation instantly evaporating in his concern. “Are you all right? Have you broken anything?”

“No, I’m fine – oh, _Mal-!_ ”

“You stay still!” He felt anxiously at her ankles and wrists, knees and elbows, testing them while he tried not to notice the tears trickling down her cheeks. Then, when more checks and questions seemed to indicate she really hadn’t sustained any serious injury apart from bruises and a slightly twisted ankle, he simply picked her up, carried her into the lounge and lowered her gently down onto the couch, where he piled cushions at the other end of it and elevated her ankle. Finally he whipped the throw off the back of it, tucked it around her and told her to lie still and rest.

“I’m a bastard,” he muttered, kneeling beside her and holding her hand. “I should never have left you the way I did.”

“Sweetie.” She laid her hands on either side of his face. “You’re safe, and that’s all that matters. It truly is.”

As always, the assertion of his value made him swerve away. “I’ll make you a cup of tea. Do you have a support bandage in the house? You’ll need painkillers too, you’ll stiffen up after this...”

“Malcolm.” She caught his arm as he went to move. “No. This time, don’t go.”

He paused, looking down, but said nothing.

Her right hand stroked gently along his jaw, rasping on two days’ worth of stubble. “You’ve been through a terrible experience, Malcolm Reed, and you need love. You’ve always needed love, right from long before I met you, but you’ve never believed you deserve it.

“And now you need it more than ever.”

“And deserve it less than ever.” He forced the words though a suddenly tight throat. Behind his closed eyelids he watched again the small, distant bloom of an explosion on a small moon, where three Xindi died in the blast of a torpedo he’d aimed and fired.

A minor peccadillo, really, set against what he’d done in his Section 31 days; and merely the cherry on the top of what he’d been drawn into in the hunt for the Weapon. But suddenly the thought of those three anonymous Xindi, powerless to alert others or even call for help when _Enterprise_ suddenly appeared on their sensors and locked weapons on them, filled him with a burning sense of shame.

He’d talked about it with Lieutenant Commander Hicks, but only in the most general of terms, shielding his feelings from the man as if protecting a gut-wound from a salt bath. All of his Section training had been deployed to keep his face immobile, his voice level; and yes, he’d been acting on Captain Archer’s orders... 

_“Target the facility.”_

_“Lock.”_

_T’Pol, on the other side of the Bridge, had uttered one word of measured protest in the aching silence. “Sir.”_

_“We can’t risk it. Fire.”_

_The days and weeks and months of constantly checking the alignment, calculating vector and payload, even charting compensation for potential interference from stellar winds or planetary gravity ... it had all come down to that single gleaming cylinder speeding down from the ship’s underbelly._

_They must have watched it coming. Maybe they’d prayed, if they believed in a god. Maybe they’d thought about their families – there wouldn’t have been time for recording any last messages – just the ticking seconds, till the torpedo buried itself in the superstructure of the tiny facility, and - BOOM!_

“So you were simply acting on Captain Archer’s orders when you fired the torpedo.”

_So what the fuck difference did that make? Did his orders press that fucking button? Did they send that torpedo down to wipe out three poor bastards who couldn’t even fight back?_

_Wasn’t that exactly what the Xindi did – the ones who’d sent the probe? The ones who’d murdered Lizzie Tucker and seven million other people?_

_Was there some other poor fucker somewhere out there who’d pressed the button and thought ‘It’s not my fault, I was acting on orders’?_

_But it was never that simple, never nearly that simple._

He’d gone back to his quarters that night and sat in a corner of his room with his arms over his head, while in his mind endless verses of the _‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’_ spooled in the vacancy.

_‘All stood together on the deck,_

_For a charnel-dungeon fitter:_

_All fixed on me their stony eyes,_

_That in the Moon did glitter._

_The pang, the curse, with which they died,_

_Had never passed away:_

_I could not draw my eyes from theirs,_

_Nor turn them up to pray.’_

Now, kneeling in Holly’s lounge, he found scalding tears suddenly burning between his lashes.

“I thought I was over it all, Holly,” he whispered brokenly, willing them not to fall. “I thought I’d left it behind, what I was, what I’d done – but you can’t, he’s still there, I’ll never be free of him, never...”

“Sweetie, slow-worms are about the most complex organism that can shed living parts of itself.” She pulled him closer, pressing his head down onto her chest, her voice full of an aching tenderness. “There’s no cure for the things that were done to any of us, only finding a way to deal with them so they don’t have power over us anymore.”

“Back in the – in there – I was trying, I was _trying_ to be – I was trying to cope – but if they’d found me guilty, I – I’d have broken, I’d have murdered people just doing their jobs – and that was him, that was all him, and there was – there was nothing I could have done to stop him–”

“Malcolm Reed, you told me once about a time Commander Tucker told you to ‘stop being a hero, because it doesn’t suit you’. Now on that occasion he was wrong, because you weren’t trying to be a hero. But right now I think you’re trying too damn hard altogether to be a hero, and it’s time you just let yourself be a hurt human being who’s gone through hell!”

 _“Oh Christ!”_ And then it came, the dam broke that he’d held together with pride, obstinacy, worn out sticky-tape and now and again just his fingernails digging into the crumbling clay as though he was holding onto the only thing that kept him from falling into the crevasse.

He’d never made sounds like it. His throat ached for hours afterwards. For the first time for as long as he could remember, he let go of every scrap of restraint, every scruple of behaviour; but Holly held him throughout, her arms wrapped protectively around him and her lips pressed to the top of his head.

Long afterwards, she tugged gently at his still-trembling hand. “Come upstairs, Malcolm.”

He lifted his face and swiped at it with his sleeve. He felt as if he’d been run over by a ten-ton cargo truck; fuck knew what he looked like.

Still, he followed her docilely up the stairs to the bathroom, and stood unmoving while she stripped his clothes off, too exhausted even to muster one of his usual quips about her getting him naked. With the same calm briskness she stripped off her own clothes and got both of them into the shower cubicle, where she washed his hair and then his body. Almost tentatively he put his arms around her; this was by far their most intimate moment since they’d met, but all he wanted right now was to hold and be held, to rest his head on her shoulder while the water coursed over him like forgiveness.

For a long time they stood so, but eventually she switched the shower off. Fetching towels and dressing-gowns from the airing cupboard, she competently towelled him dry and then attended to herself, last of all winding her wet hair up in a towelling turban.

“Into bed, love,” she said, pushing him along the landing towards her room. “Whatever sleep you got for the last two nights, I’ll bet it didn’t do you much good.

“I’ll be up in a sec. And before you say anything, yes, I’ll be more careful this time.”

He wanted to argue, especially about her overtaxing her ankle rather than resting it, but he was too tired. He stumbled towards the room, and it felt more than ever like a sanctuary. There was the dressing-table with the triptych mirror and the posy of white lavender in front of it; there was the old pine chest of drawers with a Tiffany lamp on top of it and a piece of folded cardboard pushed under one of the feet to stop it rocking on the uneven floorboards; there was the old armchair by the window where Holly would sit watching the snow fall for the first time in the winter, laying a magical spell of white over the dale. You couldn’t see it so well from downstairs, but here you had a clear view over the lane, down across the patchwork fields down to the twisting course of the river and up the side of Pen Hill.

And the bed... antique pine, with two mattresses, and the quilt thrown anyhow where she must have scrambled out from underneath it, hearing the sound of the latch on the garden gate (bloody woman must have ears like a bat): a deep, soft quilt, with a white cover patterned with knots of heartsease and forget-me-nots...

Aching in every limb, he pulled it slowly into position, tossed his dressing-gown across the chair, and slipped underneath the duvet. There was still a ghost of warmth there, and he slid gratefully into it. If he didn’t put a comb through his hair before it dried he’d look like a damn hedgehog when he woke up...

“Bugger it,” he muttered, laying his head on the pillow. He could smell lavender in that, too, like in his meditation cushion aboard _Enterprise_ ; fortunately that wasn’t one of the things that triggered his bloody allergies.

He’d begun sliding helplessly towards beckoning sleep when Holly reappeared, carrying a tray. “Just get something inside you, love, and then you’ll sleep better.”

“That’s _my_ line,” he mumbled, feeling too tired and lazy to move.

“Sweetie, in your current condition I don’t think you could even raise a smile. So come on. One last effort.”

A Reed always obliges a lady. So – not without aches and grumbles – he hoisted himself up on the pillows and slowly ate three slices of home-made brown bread spread with butter and cinnamon honey, and drank a mug of Holly’s warmed wine; and though at first it was just to be obliging, as soon as he got the taste he realised how hungry he was (the rabbit and the pigeon hadn’t lasted him long) and could have eaten another three slices if he’d had the energy.

“Well done.” She kissed his forehead and took away the tray, which she set down on top of the chest of drawers beside the Tiffany lamp, and then she removed her own dressing-gown and got into bed with him. “Now come here and snuggle up.”

Which took the last embers of his failing strength, and even as he wrapped his arms around her he felt himself falling at last into oblivion.

And for the first time since entering the Expanse, he slept like a child.


	3. Langford

Her own two nights of poor sleep on top of the stresses and strains of the past couple of months crowned by the Transatlantic flight home finally took their revenge, and the short November day was near its end by the time Holly opened her eyes again.

She looked at the ceiling and saw the pink glow of sunset reflected there, and for a moment lay frowning sleepily over what on earth she was doing in bed at this hour; and then the arm still across her waist tightened in sleepy possessiveness, and the events of earlier that day cascaded back into her mind.

Malcolm had probably never looked worse, with his jaw black with stubble, his hair in wild disorder and his eyes still slightly red and swollen. If he looked in a mirror he’d have fifty fits, she thought, looking down at him fondly. But oddly enough, she’d never felt so close to him as she did right now.

Infected wounds need to be cleaned and searched, and Malcolm’s inner self – his soul, for want of a better word – had been wounded long ago. Now the abscess had finally ruptured, and at least some of the pus had bled out. Hopefully, with loving care on her part and trust on his, more could be drained over the coming weeks; it would probably be a long time before he was anywhere near fully healed, if indeed that ever happened. But what he needed almost as much as acceptance was _rest_ , and that was something he would find here in the peace of the countryside, in a place that hadn’t changed significantly in the last couple of thousand years.

Stealthily she slipped from his grasp, and leaving him still asleep she went to the bathroom and then downstairs to the kitchen, wincing as she found out that she had indeed stiffened up from her tumble down the stairs earlier on. The previous day she’d laid hold of hope by making Scotch pancakes, and they were still perfectly OK warmed up. She put four on a plate, buttered and topped with raspberries and a drizzle of honey – she couldn't use the peanut butter in the fridge, last opened three months ago - and carried them up to him on a tray along with a couple of mugs of coffee, doing her best to ignore the twinges from her ill-used ankle as she slowly mounted the stairs.

“Tomorrow it’s your turn, sweetie,” she said as she laid the tray on the bedside table. “Today it’s my treat.”

“Unh?” He opened his eyes and blinked at her, and she smiled at the thought of what his subordinates in the Armoury would think if they could see him now. He looked like a half-stunned pirate; all he needed was an eye-patch and a parrot.

“Breakfast,” she explained. “Or, more accurately, break-fast.”

He squinted towards the window. “What time is it?”

“About a quarter past four.”

“Bloody hell.” He struggled to sit upright with a loss of grace that did more than anything else to betray his exhaustion. “My sleep times are all over the place.”

“And what you will do while you’re here is sleep if, when and for as long as your body wants to, and sooner or later it will reset its own clock without being forced to.” She leaned down to plant a kiss on his nose, and then perched on the end of the bed to drink her own coffee.

“I see you’ve put your cloak of invisibility on again,” he remarked, nodding at her dressing gown as he picked up the plate. “Pity.”

“Yes, well, I need to preserve some vestige of respectability if the postman arrives. It’s not everyone who needs to see me in my birthday suit.”

“Well if it’s gone four o’clock the postman will have gone home hours ago, and even if he hasn’t, he won’t be coming upstairs, will he? ...Oh, all right, you don’t need to tell me. ‘You rule nothing in and nothing out’. Story of my bloody life, with you.” He bit gloomily into a pancake. 

Holly nibbled her lip thoughtfully. “Actually I was thinking more in terms of stubble possibly feeling quite sexy. Applied with the appropriate care, of course.”

From the way he nearly choked, she speculated with interest that he’d inadvertently swallowed a raspberry whole. “What?” he rasped when he’d managed to wash it down with a gulp of coffee. Fortunately she’d made this with a bit more milk than usual, otherwise he’d have scalded his mouth.

She let her gaze wander across the width of his shoulders, for the first time allowing herself to appreciate them in a way that was more than purely aesthetic. “You heard.”

He gave her a narrow-eyed stare that made her shiver with anticipation. “Are you actually sitting there and telling me that after all this time, all I had to do to change your mind was NOT SHAVE?”

“Well not _exactly_ ,” she said demurely. “I’m sure I’d have resigned myself somehow if you had.”

“Re– Holly Langford, I’m going to smack your arse when I get hold of it!”

“Ooh, you know how to sweet-talk a girl, I’ll give you that.”

“Come here.” He put the plate back on the bedside table and pointed to his lap.

She lifted an eyebrow.

“I said come here.”

“I hope that’s a promise.”

“It’s a bloody certainty. Put that coffee down and shift yourself.”

Deciding that ‘please’ wasn’t something he was in the mood for, she put her coffee on the chest of drawers, walked back to the bed and slid a knee gracefully across his thighs. “Ooh, have you got a phase pistol in your pocket, Lieutenant, or are you pleased to see me?” she cooed.

“You decide, Missy. You’re the one who’s going to get it discharged amidships.” He yanked the belt undone, and then with his hands on the collar of the dressing-gown he paused. “Holly, this ... I don’t want this to be...”

“For pity?” she said equally quietly. “I wouldn’t do that to either of us, Malcolm.”

And she leaned down and kissed him, while he pushed the gown down off her shoulders; and it was much, much later that night before the pancakes were finished.


	4. Reed

_Last evening._

He’d spun out the idyll for as long as he thought he reasonably could, letting himself be guided for once by a medical professional who was his care-giver as well as his lover. For all that had now flowered between them, she could still achieve separation between her personal feelings for him as a man and her professional judgement on his mental state, and his stay here hadn’t been unalloyed pleasure. She’d been thorough and sometimes ruthless in coaxing out the grains of poison from his wounds and healing them with her acceptance, and even though afterwards he sometimes felt the need to go outside on his own and run for hours along the winding lanes, he always came back feeling that another fragment of himself had been put back into place.

But he was a Starfleet officer and _Enterprise_ had completed all her trials and would soon be leaving Jupiter Station on another long voyage. He didn’t necessarily have to be there for the start of it – the captain had said arrangements could be made to pick him up at some point – but he felt that it was where he needed to be now. And Holly, partly to his relief and partly to his vague disappointment, had agreed with him.

“Penny for them.” She was lying with her head on his chest, and now turned to look up at him. They were both on the hearthrug, replete with lovemaking and buttered crumpets (not forgetting the damson jam), and the room was in darkness but for the fluttering firelight. The curtains had been long closed to shut out the turbulent winter night, while Dickon, satisfied that the noisy part of the evening’s activities was over, had sneaked in and settled down between the curve of Holly’s back and the fire, blissfully toasty with two bodies protecting him from so much as the suggestion of a draught.

“Ah... nothing really.”

“One of us is a psychologist and the other is a rotten liar.”

He winced. He must be getting rusty. Or maybe it was that with this woman, he didn’t even really want to lie.

“Are you worried about going back? Specifically, about your relationship with Captain Archer?”

A reluctant nod. That was playing on his mind a bit. _‘_ _How long can a man go on, Holly? How often can he break and be mended? When others deliberately set out to change everything you are, how do you find your way back to what you were?’_

What was done couldn’t be undone. It wasn’t only the events in the Expanse that would have changed the relationship between him and the captain. Both of them had – however briefly – been taught to view each other as _the enemy._

It hadn’t been true, of course. But the process had involved peeling away some of his illusions about the captain, and it had not been a comfortable discovery that the man whom he’d been on the way to regarding as a substitute father figure could not, after all, be relied on absolutely.

It wasn’t as though some damage hadn’t already been done. The exigencies of the voyage to find the Weapon had exposed terrible flaws in the idol. But even at his worst, Malcolm had still believed that his crew mattered more to Jonathan Archer than anything...

“Sweetie.” Her fingertip traced his top lip. The firelight gleamed on the gold bangle that he’d finally been able to give her, the one engraved with _‘Your heart and my heart are very old friends’._ “He’s not a bad man. Actually I think he’s rather cute, but he’s carrying his own burdens like we all do.

“Everyone’s relationships change. It just happens. I know you can deal with this.”

He kissed her finger. “I’ll do my best.”

There was silence for a while, marked off by the soft, slow ticking of the antique short-case clock in the alcove. Counting down the time till the taxi arrived tomorrow, to whisk him off to Newcastle Airport and the first leg of his long journey back to Starfleet Headquarters.

He had to go. He _wanted_ to go. But now more than ever before it felt like he would be leaving a piece of his heart here when he left.

It would be insufferably conceited of him to worry that Holly would be lonely when he was gone. He already knew that she was active in the community and had many friends, and that she was entirely self-sufficient here in the cottage. Worse, it would surely be selfish of him to hope that she would at least miss him a little bit – if not half as much as he would miss her when he was lying down alone on his spartan bunk on board ship, and there was a Holly-shaped emptiness in the curve of his left arm.

He drew a deep breath. “Holly, can I ask you a question?”

“The usual fees apply for my invaluable advice.”

“I – I know you’re being paid by Starfleet for treating me. That’s only fair, that’s your living. But–“

“Malcolm.” She raised her head and looked at him very steadily. “I may be unorthodox in a lot of ways, but I do _not_ sleep with my patients.”

His heart did something extremely undignified.

“As of our departure from San Francisco, your after-care has been transferred to Doctor Phlox, with whom I’ll be sharing as much of my knowledge of you as you feel comfortable with, _with your consent_. I can’t say I’ve ever had much experience of dealing with a Denobulan before, but when you were closeted with Starfleet the afternoon before we left, he and I had quite a discussion. I’d say your privacy is just as safe with him as it is with me, and I had to find someone I could trust to hand on your case to. Max has told the Section they’ll just have to deal with it, and I understand they’re not particularly pleased, but they’ll put up with it. Because I can’t ethically carry on a professional relationship with a man I’ve fallen in love with.”

His mouth shaped _in love with_ but he couldn’t utter the words.

“I know you had something to ask,” she continued evenly. “I just want to get that out on the table before you do, because in one way it’s going to change the whole dynamic of our relationship. In another, it won’t change it at all, because no matter what you do or where you go, I’ll still be here for you when you come back.”

She put her head down on his chest again.

Though only a few minutes ago he’d been half-asleep, now he was completely wide awake. And, if he was honest with himself, scared stiff.

Relationships had never been his thing. As he’d revealed to Trip Tucker on that unforgettable occasion when they’d been stranded together in Shuttlepod One and – as he’d thought – facing their inescapable end, he’d had a string of failed romances in the past, all of which bore witnesses to his utter incompetence with emotional connection. But at the heart of that inability to connect there had been the knowledge that if the women concerned had even suspected what he’d been and done in his past, they’d never have even kissed him. The man they were involved with was a carefully-constructed façade, and so, inevitably, they’d discovered he was hollow.

Only for Holly could he be himself. And as painful – no, often as _agonising_ – as it had been to slowly let her see the damaged human being behind the façade, she had bathed his wounds with the balm of her acceptance. If he’d found healing at all for any of them, it was only due to her. Only she knew what he was, what he’d become, what he was trying to live with, and now – this.

He felt as if a butterfly had landed on his outstretched palm. He, who was at the top of his field working with the most delicate components of powerful ordnance, who’d disarmed high explosive devices without ever once doubting his capabilities, now hardly dared move his fingers in case his clumsiness brushed off the tiniest fleck of jewel dust from the fragile wings, or even scared it away altogether.

“And if you _dare_ even _think_ you don’t deserve it, Malcolm Reed, then you and I are going to fall out.” Her voice came on a dry note that made him jump guiltily.

He had to give something in return. Had to reveal something that had been growing unseen in the darkness inside him, and come into flower when they became lovers; something that deserved to be brought into the light and given to her.

“I – I’m not sure I do, whatever you say,” he breathed. “But I want so much to know you’ll always be here for me, Holly.

“You’ve become more important to me than anyone else in the world. I didn’t know how much you meant to me till the day they brought me into that bloody room in the jail and you were there. It was like – it was like suddenly I could believe in life again.

“I know this hasn’t exactly – I mean, I haven’t even said – and it won’t – bloody hell, I don’t–” He stopped himself and drew a deep, shaky breath. “Before I make myself look even more of a prat than I already do, will you – will you marry me, Holly?”

The pause that followed was long enough for several stellar nurseries to evolve and die. At least, that was what it felt like.

Then she raised her head again and rested her chin against his ribs. The smile of delight spread out across her face but, not daring to trust his eyes, he waited with held breath for her to say the magic words.

“Of course I will, Malcolm!”

**THE END.**

**Author's Note:**

> Reviews make me very happy. If you've enjoyed this, please leave one! Thank you!


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